Mathematics Journals

Thoughts about scholarly journals, with an emphasis on mathematics, from a society publisher (now ex-publisher) -- meant to encourage thoughtful discussion about journals rather than strident posturing.

Friday, February 20, 2015

The Digital Downside

Scholars and librarians usually
focus on the advantages of electronic journals—faster processing, reduced
costs, and new features (such as searching and linking)—and there are indeed
many such advantages. But like all technology, electronic journals have a
downside as well. Most people have ignored this downside because these problems
are presently little more than annoyances. But we should understand the
downside in order to prevent these small annoyances from turning into big
crises in the future. In one or two cases, it may already be too late.

Here are ﬁve problems with
electronic journals—problems that arise when the miraculous new technology is
combined with the human fraili­ties of carelessness, greed, myopia, dogmatism,
and infatuation.

1 Careless Scholars

In the digital age, we can do
things we could never do before. Here are some examples from the recent
literature of things we can do:

A journal
posts an article in January; in April, without any notice, the editors
replace the article with a “corrected” version.

A journal
posts an article in July; in November, the publisher sim­ply removes the
article (without notifying the authors!).

A journal
posts an article in April, but the author posts a corrected and
substantially changed version on a well-known server in Oc­tober, with an
indication that the article appeared in April, but no indication that it
was different.

Mathematics relies on its
literature for its underpinnings; its liter­ature is interconnected. Imagine a
world in which one percent of the mathematical literature is affected in the
above way, in which one per­cent of the articles one ﬁnds are not the
“authentic” versions. Over time, as work based on faulty references spreads,
the fraction of unre­liable literature will increase. Experts may be able to
overcome this, but nonexperts will be overwhelmed. We ignore this potential
crisis at the peril of future generations of mathematicians.

These sloppy practices occur
because new technology allows us to do things never before possible. That
doesn’t mean we should do them! To prevent this from destroying the scholarly
literature, we need to insist on high standards. There are two ways to handle
this—back­-linking or forward-linking—and both require discipline. Every author
regrets publishing mistakes (as do publishers!), but we have to resist the
temptation to hide them.

2 Big Deals

The electronic age has made it
possible for big publishers to offer big deals. Here’s the way they work.
Rather than subscribing to journals one by one, an institution is offered
electronic access to a huge package of journals across many ﬁelds (many of
which were previously unavail­able to the institution). Initially, the cost of
this package is comparable to the cost of the publisher’s journals to which the
institution previously subscribed, and (the publisher points out) it’s always
far less than the total cost of the individual subscriptions. This seems to be
a wonderful opportunity for the institution, and the vice-president for
information (the one who negotiated the deal) crows about the ﬁscal prowess
that brought about this arrangement.

Big deals are now offered by Elsevier (an innovator in this area), Springer, Wiley, Blackwell, and Taylor & Francis. In a recent survey of US research libraries, 93% indicated that they held bundles with at least one of these publishers. Just about half (49%) held bundles with at least four. Wiley, Elsevier, and Springer have achieved 70% market penetration.[2]

Figure 1. Percentage of commercial journals among all mathematics journals

When asked about their
motivation, most said that it was a “good return on investment” and that the
“alternatives . . . were prohibitively expensive.”

But these institutions have paid
a heavy price for that “good in­vestment.” Such big deals are almost always
multi-year contracts that do not allow cancellations or changes. The extra
titles are often of marginal value to scholars. Most importantly, decisions
about what is purchased are made at a high level, far removed from scholars
them­selves. In the end, big deals make it more difﬁcult for scholars to make
sensible decisions about journals based on price and need. Of course, big deals
give the big publishers a substantial advantage over smaller publishers, which
is their real purpose.

Big deals are hard to resist,
although a few prominent libraries have done so. But the commercial publishers
are winning. In 1985, roughly a third of mathematics articles were in
commercial journals; by 2004, over half the articles were commercial.[3]We need to ﬁght back.

3 Walt Disney

The Walt Disney story is a
metaphor. The ﬁrst Mickey Mouse cartoon was produced and copyrighted in 1928.
By the late 1990s, the term of copyright for Mickey Mouse (then 75 years for
corporate works) was about to expire in 2003. The Disney corporation was making
lots of money on the character, partly because new technology allowed new uses.
What did Disney do? It persuaded the US Congress to change the law, extending
copyright by 20 years. It is now 95 years for corpo­rations; for authored
works, copyright extends for the life of the author plus 70 years.

Copyright—the ability to own
intellectual property—was never meant to be forever (the late Jack Valenti, as
head of the movie producers’ as­sociation, was overheard to say the term should
be “forever minus a day”). But as technology progressed over the past 400
years, copy­right became longer and longer . . . barely indistinguishable from
for­ever. Until the digital age, this did not affect scholarly publishing much.
Now, however, there are new reasons to worry about copyright’s reach.

Scholarly publishers have never
made much money by selling jour­nal back volumes. In the age of print,
publishers kept a few copies of old journals to sell to libraries when they
wanted to replace missing volumes or (rarely) to start a new collection.
Typically, such sales of back volumes amounted to one to three percent of
journal revenues. Publishers expected to recover their initial costs (and make
a proﬁt) by selling current subscriptions, not by selling back volumes.

Now, however, like the Disney
corporation, publishers see an op­portunity to make money on their old material
using new technology. They want to sell their journals twice, once as a current
subscription and a second time as a collection of backﬁles. There are many
varia­tions on this scheme, some merely sell the backﬁles with the current
subscription, pointing out that it makes the subscription more valuable (and
hence more expensive). But the central point is that publishers carefully
control access to the backﬁles.

Of course, publishers who
digitize their back volumes want to re­cover their costs. But rather than ﬁnd a
way to pay the one-time cost of digitization, and then make the material freely
available, they want to continue making money next year, and the year after
that, and after that, and on and on into the future. This includes publishers
of every kind, not just the commercial ones.

This doesn’t make sense for Mickey
Mouse, but it makes even less sense for scholarship. By “owning” scholarship
and restricting access indeﬁnitely, publishers make it impossible to realize
the dream of con­necting the large body of the past scholarly literature to the
present. This makes our present journals less valuable, not more, and
ultimately hurts the publishers themselves.

Copyright was invented to make
publishing proﬁtable. But no one— no publisher, no author, no one—needs to hold
copyright for more than two or three decades. We ought to make a pact that
everything goes into the public domain after 28 years.[4]

4 Mindless Accountants

Using ﬂawed statistics to make
(equally ﬂawed) decisions is not new. But it is so, so much easier to do in the
digital age. Many people have written about the “impact factor,” which is more
and more frequently misused, but I want to talk about another troublesome
statistic—journal usage, which is even more dangerous than the impact factor.

Librarians all over the world
are insisting on usage statistics for journals, which roughly translates into
the number of downloads of var­ious articles over a given period of time. They
claim this is necessary in order to measure the value of journals and to make
decisions about sub­scriptions. Publishers in general seem happy to
oblige—almost eager in many cases.

This is a hopelessly naive and
dangerous game. What is the meaning of such usage statistics? What does it mean
that some article has been downloaded 100 times? Have people read it 100 times?
Surely not— you don’t read every item on which you click while browsing the
web, so why would scholars read every article they download? And which is more
valuable, an article downloaded once a week for ten years, or one downloaded
520 times in its ﬁrst month? What about caching and the many ﬂaws in browser
software that give rise to faulty counts? There are many questions, but almost
no answers—just the demand for usage statistics in order to measure value.

Making decisions using ignorant
accounting has always been a bad idea, but in this case it may have some
disastrous consequences. If li­brarians are really going to measure value by
clicks, surely publishers will force users to click more often. It would be
foolish to give away abstracts or references or even bibliographic data, for
example, if this leads to fewer clicks and hence less value. And if value
equals clicks, then why on earth would publishers let authors post copies of
papers anywhere except on the publisher’s website. The more liberal a pub­lisher’s
policy in this regard, the more the publisher risks losing value. Making
decisions by using ﬂawed usage statistics will inevitably shift publishers’
practices, all in the wrong direction. We need to explain this to those who
dogmatically claim that value can be measured by a few ﬂawed numbers.

5 Fads and Fashions

A corrupted literature, a
literature controlled by a handful of giant publishers, a literature hidden
away forever, a literature shaped by nutty accountants using ﬂawed
statistics—all these are potential crises caused by the advent of electronic
publishing. None is insurmountable, but each is worrisome. And so with these
worries pressing upon us, what do we advance as our most pressing issue in the
new electronic age? Access—open access to the literature.

On the face of it, this is
bizarre. In the digital age, scholars have more access to the literature than
ever before. When an institution subscribes to a journal, the articles are now
delivered straight to a user’s desktop. Finding articles is far easier than
ever before using any number of search tools. Articles can be downloaded,
printed, and (dare we admit?) sent to others via email. Even when a user’s
institution does not subscribe to a journal, the user can see the abstract and
(often) the list of references. This allows scholars to decide whether the
article is useful and then to send email to the author to ask for a copy (or
simply to ﬁnd it elsewhere on the web—recent changes in publisher policies make
this easy). And many publishers provide access to older articles without any
subscription at all. None of this was possible in the print-only world—none of
it! In the print world, good access to the scholarly literature was restricted
to a few institutions, and near-universal access was unheard of. This has all
changed.

Nonetheless, instead of focusing
on the four potential crises men­tioned above, the scholarly community has
decided to focus on access, the one aspect of the scholarly literature that has
already been greatly improved in the digital age.

I have spent a lot of time
trying to understand why people seem obsessed with access, and I have come to
realize that there is no simple answer. In part, it is human nature: when
things improve, we want to improve them still more. Having a taste of increased
access, people want completely unfettered access. In part, this is because the
call to “open access” is simple to understand. Scholars are not willing to
invest time in wrestling with the tougher issues of scholarly publishing
mentioned above, which are messy and sometimes hard to unravel. But there is a
more subtle, and more insidious, reason for the obsession with access: whenever
technology changes the world around us, we become more susceptible to fads and
fashions. New technology opens up new opportunities, and new opportunities
bring forth opportunists— zealous people who promote their own special causes.

On the face of it, increased
access is surely not a bad thing: it is hard to argue against having more
access to scholarship. On the other hand, it can be bad if it causes us to
ignore the real problems we face, and it can be tragic if new enticing
technology combines with an irresistible fad to mislead us into acting against
our own interests.

Open access has had both effects
on mathematics. When plan­ning for our digital future, we spend most of our
time talking about access (already greatly improved), and almost no time
talking about the integrity of scholarship, copyright issues, foolish
bureaucrats who use faulty statistics, or (worst of all!) avaricious publishers
who have created a crisis in scholarly publishing. Instead, we talk about ac­cess.
And, of course, those avaricious publishers are delighted by the distraction.

We also formulate ideas that are
clearly bad for mathematics. The author-pay model for journals simply does not
work for mathemati­cians. Our funding levels do not support it and they never
will, at least at the levels of medical sciences. We will always be at a
competitive disadvantage to other scientists in an author-pay world.

The self-archiving model of open
access is clearly bad for mathe­matics, which more than any other discipline
depends on the long-term survival of a reliable web of scholarship—into the
distant future many decades from now. And preprint servers, without any obvious
source of long-term funding, are not much more attractive.

The government-funded model of
open access is also clearly bad for mathematics, which has never competed well
with the other sci­ences for government largess. Besides, the budget for the
government-funded model seems to assume a stable publishing environment for the
long term, without the need to invest in ever changing technol­ogy. Surely this
is short-sighted. We will have to invest even more in the coming decade than we
have in the past in order to keep up with changing technology. Will the
government really do that investing?

Indeed, every model of open
access that has been proposed is clearly detrimental to the broad interests of
mathematicians. But open access has become an obsession for many that has
blinded otherwise thought­ful people into acting against their own interests.
That is a real down­side to new technology that may do the most damage in the
long term. This is a downside that already affects us.

Don’t believe me? Just check out
those large commercial publishers who are all beginning to embrace open access.
They are creating sepa­rate corporate units, just to promote and implement open
access. They can do that—they have the resources. They know that no matter how
the business model changes, they will be able to take advantage of it to make
money—lots of it. Surely publishers who have raised subscrip­tion prices for
years will feel equally free to raise author charges in the future. Change is
good for large corporations, who have the resources to invest in change; it is
a lot harder for the little guys who operate on a tight budget and make a tiny
proﬁt. This is especially bad for math­ematics, which has traditionally relied
on more small and independent journals than any other discipline. If open
access is so great for us—if open access is about to solve all our problems—why
are the commercial publishers jumping on the bandwagon?

6 Summing Up

Are there disadvantages to
electronic journals? Of course there are. Should we advocate abandoning the
digital age because of those dis­advantages? Of course not. And in any case,
the digital age is here to stay, no matter what we advocate. But as we move
forward into the new age, we need to make clear the principles that should
underlie our scholarly literature.

I believe in formulating clear
policies about the integrity of scholar­ship. I believe in ﬁghting to keep
decision making in the hands of schol­ars. I believe that no one should own
ideas for too long—scholarship belongs to all of us and moving walls should be
universal. And I be­lieve that scholars, and not accountants, should measure
the value of scholarship.

But I believe most of all that
we must stay focused on these real problems as the world changes around us, and
not be distracted by fads—especially fads that will hurt mathematics (and
scholarship more generally) in the long run.

The digital age will
dramatically change the way in which we dis­seminate scholarship in the future
. . . but we have to guide that change so that it makes things better and not
worse.

Monday, January 28, 2013

I have read several comments recently indignantly protesting
that "author-pay-journals" are not after all actually
"author-pay". The fees the journal charges for publication of an
article are supposed to be called "article processing charges", and
there are supposed to be safeguards in place to guarantee that articles are
published whether or not the fees are collected. These are safeguards offered with
the best of intentions. They are hopelessly naïve and perhaps even slightly
dishonest.

The new open access mathematics journals offered by Cambridge
University Press are a good example. Proponents claim that once a paper is
accepted for publication, an author has merely to arrange for his/her
institution to send a letter stating that it is unwilling to pay the article
charges – with no need for justification whatsoever. And I am quite certain
that in the heady early days of gold open access, some institutions and funding
agencies will indeed pay the charges. But some will not, especially without
required justification. Over time, will the former continue to subsidize the
latter? Surely not, and surely a business model built on volunteer payments
alone cannot sustain itself in the long-run.

Several years ago, earnest scholars who had begun free
online journals ran out of volunteer time and the modest amount of money needed
to keep their journals running. These were high-quality journals with admirable
goals, and the scholars proposed a simple scheme to keep them going: They asked
libraries to pay a very small subscription fee, hoping that many small fees add
up to the modest support they needed. That small fee would be a contribution to
the battle against high subscription fees for commercial journals, they argued.
Surely libraries would want to contribute. Invariably, they did not. If
universities could access journals for free, why should they use scarce dollars
to pay for access?

Now we are expected to believe that universities will make a
much more substantial voluntary contribution to publish the papers of their own
faculty. Maybe, for a while, they will. But over time, as dollars become scarce
and there is pressure to spend them on other important things, even wealthy
universities will decline to subsidize less-wealthy universities.

The long-term consequences of these policies are determined
partly by simple business principles, but even more so by basic human
psychology. Alas, the naïve scholars who assure us that gold open access can be
accomplished without authors ever actually paying the charges are not
especially attuned to human psychology (or business principles). The publishers
who are their partners in the new journals are not naïve, however, and the initial
low article charges and assurances that no one will actually have to pay are
slightly dishonest. They know better. This is simply bait-and-switch, albeit in
a scholarly and refined setting.

The author-pay model is exactly that—the author pays. We
should not try to obscure reality with fanciful promises. Right now, the fee
may come from the university or some funding agency, but inevitably the author
"authorizes" the charge. For many new and proliferating journals,
authors themselves are indeed paying, and journals cannot prevent them from
doing so. Over the long-run all journals will require payment somehow—they must.
If one insists on gold open access, this is the price one pays. It may be worth
the cost, but pretending there is no cost is foolish.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

What’s the price of a journal?

For that matter, what is the price of a car or a novel or a loaf of bread? All these things are frequently discounted, but we don’t throw up our hands and claim that they don't have a "real” price. Yet on several occasions recently, I’ve heard people say that we can't tell the price of journals because they are often discounted.

When the editorial board of the journal Topology resigned and began a competing journal, Elsevier wrote: “Because the majority of our subscribers purchase this journal in a larger set of journals, most are paying a fraction of the institutional subscription price.” I’ve heard similar arguments from other publishers, who like to compute the “price” of a journal by dividing the total revenue by the number of “subscribers”. But that’s not the price! It’s the “average revenue per subscriber."

The (list) price of a journal is set by the publisher, and it’s plainly visible to anyone who examines annual price lists. For some journals, there may be a two-tiered price, one for institutions and one for individuals, but in every case there is a price. Just as for cars or novels or bread, journals may be sold at a discount. But it's important to remember that publishers discount journals for business reasons, not because, in a sudden fit of remorse, they want to lower the price. Journals are sometimes discounted to agents, who consolidate them to help libraries purchase from multiple publishers. They are discounted to institutional members of scholarly societies as a member benefit, in return for dues. And journals are discounted to subscribers who buy bundles of journals, often making a commitment to buy for several years. In each case, the publisher is discounting journals in order to gain some advantage -- it's a simple business arrangement.

There is nothing wrong with discounting journals; it's good business. But it doesn’t change the price. Indeed, the price is the starting point for all discounting arrangements, defining the terms of a bargain: I’ll return a portion of the price in return for some action on your part – consolidating, being a member, or purchasing a bundle. Confusing the discounted price with the actual price ignores one half of the bargain.

We should pay attention to the list price of a journal because inevitably some subscribers (quite often, most) pay the list price. But there are other reasons not to let publishers substitute the "average revenue per subscriber" for the price. The average revenue is a quotient, and publishers control both the numerator and the denominator.

Unlike the list price, we must rely on the publisher to tell us the numerator, that is, the total revenue for a journal. Calculating total revenue sounds straightforward until one realizes that when selling bundles, large publishers apportion revenue among many journals – a somewhat mysterious process that isn’t easily discovered. For many publishers, the total revenue assigned to a particular journal is a very fuzzy number indeed.

The denominator is even more problematic. How many subscribers does a journal have? If a publisher adds many journals to bundles at no charge, the number of subscribers will quickly rise. But adding unwanted (and frequently unused) journals to bundles doesn't really change the number of subscribers to each journal in any meaningful way. Allowing publishers to use these arrangements to calculate either the average price per journal (for an institution) or the average revenue per subscriber (for the publisher) is like allowing politicians to count all those people who might have voted for them (but didn't vote) in an election. And allowing publishers to tell us the "real" price of their journals is like asking car salesmen to dictate the "best" price for their cars.

Scholars face a crisis today caused by high journal prices. If they are going to make headway in addressing that crisis, they have to get smarter about journals and more sophisticated about business practices. They can't allow publishers to redefine the problem by redefining the price. That's neither smart nor sophisticated.

2004: MisdirectionAbout the debate on Open Access, which distracts us from the real crisis in journals -- exorbitant prices. August 2004. (27K)(Also appeared in Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 2004, Volume 51, Issue 6, Page B20, with the title "Open access to journals won't lower prices", http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i06/06b02001.htm )

2004: The Future of JournalsOn shaping the debate about open access -- a web presentation of the talk at the PSP meeting (Washington, DC, 2/11/04) using frames. The presentation includes navigation tools at the bottom of page, and notes of the talk can be seen by expanding the frame at the bottom of slide window.A pdf-version is also available. February 2004. (308K)

2002: Predicting the Future of Scholarly Publishing Based on talk given at the satellite conference on electronic publishing at Tsinghua University, Beijing, August [MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER, Spring 2003, 25(2), 3-6, and Proceedings of the Conference, to be published by Springer-Verlag] (80K)